Timber!

Some years ago, after a holiday party, an amateur arborist spied a linden-tree branch extending vulnerably out over East Third Street. Somewhat in his cups, and fearing that a passerby might tug on the branch and end up stripping the tree of bark, the arborist made an executive decision to perform an amputation on the spot, twisting the branch over and over until it snapped, while leaving the bark on the trunk intact. To the owner of a nearby restaurant, the emergency procedure looked suspiciously like vandalism. Threats were made to call the police. The arborist remained calm. “It’s O.K.,” he said, and reached for his wallet to produce a laminated badge. “I’m a citizen pruner.” Impressed, the restaurateur invited him in for a drink.

Citizen pruners, a few thousand Samaritans trained in the art of botanical stewardship by the nonprofit organization Trees New York, are licensed to perform surgery on the city’s street trees, as their judgment demands. “You can use a pole saw, you can use a handsaw, you can use two-handed loppers,” the holiday arborist said the other day. “You can do a lot of good with a pocketknife.”

But let’s say you really wanted to fell a whole tree (preferably an unhealthy one). Well, then, your best bet would have been to show up at an open lot on Randall’s Island, where, on a recent cold and windy morning, a group of lumberjacks were conducting a lesson in proper chain-saw technique.

“Chaps, that’s the first thing,” one instructor said, holding up a pair of bright-orange coveralls to be fastened around the waist, and beginning an hour-long preamble on the various ways in which an underdressed woodcutter can wind up looking like a victim of the horror-movie villain Leatherface.

“Let me make a point about safety glasses,” another added. “You need to have on a pair of Z87s. You know what that rating means? It means I can take a hammer and smash that glass as hard as I can and it will not break.” The students, about thirty underprivileged young people enrolled in the MillionTreesNYC training program, began examining their goggles. “Standard glasses aren’t like that,” the instructor went on. “Even though your doctor may tell you, ‘It’s shatterproof. They’re safe.’ Yeah? That lens goes back to the eyeball—it’ll cut your eye out of your skull.”

Boots: check. Earplugs (“Use a chain saw long enough without ear protection, and I guarantee you’ll be deaf”): check. Cell phone set to vibrate (“so it doesn’t ring and startle somebody”): check. On to fuelling. A third instructor produced a bottle of Stihl BioPlus lubricant. “If you add fuel on turf, it’s going to kill the turf,” he said, unscrewing the cap and preparing to pour. “If you do it on those blacktop driveways, it’s going to dissolve the driveway.”

“Best thing is the tailgate of your pickup truck,” another suggested.

Finally, it was time to start the engines. “Look how sharp that saw is,” the lead instructor said, after slicing through a log to produce a wood “cookie.” “You imagine that’s your arm, or your face?” One rule of thumb has it that a hundred and fifty stitches are required for every second of contact between a chain blade and human skin.

A dozen white poplars, stripped of their branches to resemble telephone poles, had been propped up across the lot, for practice mutilation. The class broke into groups and began cutting forty-five-degree notches into the dummy trees, which began to look like drunken totem poles. Next came the back cuts, and a lecture on the importance of leaving a hinge, for directional felling control. “Here’s what people do: they cut it and they go like this,” the goggles expert said, bending his head back and looking up. “They go, ‘Oooh.’ They watch their work. And that tree hits the ground and the thing bounces back and it smashes them in the chest and it kills them.” He began jogging away from the base of the pole. “At ten feet, go ahead and take a peek back,” he said. “You’re going to want to watch it. But keep going, man. Don’t stick around. You’ll die.”

After a few hours on the saw, in the cold, the novices had begun to be numbed by hunger to the threat of death. A thick-bearded instructor named Al Krivickas bent over a log that lay on the ground and sawed through it until he struck a rock beneath, sending up a series of sparks.

“Damn!” one of the students gasped.

“Now it’s lunchtime,” Krivickas said, with a grin, holding up the dented chain. “That’s usually how lunch comes about. That’s why it’s crazy they sell those things at Home Depot.” ♦

Ben McGrath began working at The New Yorker in 1999, and has been a staff writer since 2003.